Humanity's Side
by jtav
Summary: "I taught you to obey a man who followed the very opposite of the ideals I taught you. I didn't serve humanity. I betrayed it." Oleg Petrovsky confronts his former student. Spoilers for Omega.


One did not rise to positions of high command without learning how to read people, and Oleg could tell Lieutenant Fleischer was in a foul mood before the woman ever opened her mouth. Her eyes were hard and she trembled almost imperceptibly as if she were magma waiting to erupt from a volcano. No, not merely in a foul mood: on the precipice of exploding with rage.

"What do you want, Petrovsky?" She spat out his name as if it were an oath.

"I was going to tell you that my heating unit was broken again." For the second time since his rather mild confinement began. Surely the Alliance still had standards for how it treated captured officers? But it didn't seem politic to mention that at the moment. "But I can see you have other matters on your mind."

"You're damn right I do! If it were up to me, you'd freeze to death, you Cerberus bastard. The things you monsters did on Sanctuary deserves a lot more than that."

Oleg searched his memory. He did recall the Illusive Man mentioning the Sanctuary refugee camp in passing. It was an elegant solution to their recruiting problems. Offer refugees a place where they could be free from the war and then use their gratitude to recruit them into Cerberus. It had to be done under the name of a private company because of Cerberus' undeserved reputation, but if Oleg had cared for credit he would have stayed with the Alliance. "You'll have to enlighten me, my dear. Your superiors have seen fit to keep me in the dark about the progress of the war effort."

She bared her teeth. "Lawson set up a death camp. Trick refugees with promises of food and shelter and then jam implants into them to make them your loyal slaves. Experiment on what he couldn't use. I puked when I saw it on the news."

"You're lying." The charge was preposterous. There were rules to how one conducted warfare. He had been harsh on Omega, but it had been no more than was necessary to keep order in a place where the only law was force. Harming civilians not actively engaged in harming the war effort—those who had come to them looking for protection—was out of the question. "The Illusive Man would never consent to such. And Miranda left us nearly a year ago. It was a crippling personal blow."

"Not her. Her father. She's the one that shut it down. Threw him out a window. You're lucky I don't do the same to you. How do you sleep at night knowing the people you worked with are butchers? Then again, you aren't that much different, are you? I heard about the adjutants."

Oleg bolted from his chair. The anger was cold and sharp, tearing into him like ice. "Don't speak of what you don't understand. It doesn't become you. I'm sure you have important things to do. Best to get to them."

And so he was left alone with his thoughts. The anger was still there, just beneath the surface. He took a deep breath. You were the master of your emotions; they didn't master you. That was one of the first lessons he had taught Miranda when he had agreed to take her from Henry's home to Cerberus. Even if what Fleischer had said was true, he was nothing like Henry Lawson.

The sad truth was that someone had to be the shock troops in this war, the cannon fodder that they threw at the Reapers in hopes of slowing them down while Cerberus worked to control them. He would lose good men who only wanted to serve humanity. Why shouldn't it have been the trash of the galaxy instead? Those he would have been forced to execute in the name of keeping the peace? So he had dusted off the adjutant research and done everything within his power to avoid a repeat of the events that had brought him to Omega in the first place. It had cost more than it ever should have, but he had turned raving beasts into weapons. His men would not die, the criminals would serve a useful purpose, and civilians would be safe. Efficiency, not murder.

He had almost recovered his equilibrium when Fleischer brought him the newsvid. "Told you I wasn't lying," she said with a bitter smile. Battlespace set out the activities of Sanctuary in all their grisly detail. Men implanted with the very augmentations he had refused for himself and his troops, screaming as the doctors operated without anesthesia. Those same men, stripped of all emotion, being shipped off to serve in various theaters of war. Refugees, some children, pulped or turned into husks. Bile rose in his throat. The turians had been brutal. The geth had been brutal. Humanity was supposed to be better than this.

The recording of Lawson and the Illusive Man destroyed any hope he might have that this was some rogue cell. "With Sanctuary's help, we'll get it sorted." As if mass murder and torture were nothing more than a particularly troublesome issue of supply lines or undisciplined troops! He had always thought of the Illusive Man as a Charlemagne or Napoleon: a man with vision for humanity who would take skilled but limited people like himself and use them to achieve a higher purpose. But now, it was other names he thought of: Heydrich, Himmler, Mengele. That was how Cerberus would be remembered.

And he had helped them. He had sent good men to their deaths to hold the Omega-4 relay so that Cerberus research could continue unimpeded. He had offered extra rations to the families of those who agreed to enlist. And when he had defected, it hadn't been out of any sense of moral outrage, but a simple tactical maneuver: intel in exchange for his life and the lives of every soldier under his command that he and Shepard could smuggle out while Aria was busy whipping Omega into a bloodthirsty mob. It wasn't enough.

He stared out the window. Mindoir had been rebuilt since the slaver raids fifteen years ago. Children played. Skycars moved lazily from place to place. The war was far away here. The Alliance had given him perfectly serviceable quarters. It wouldn't have been such a bad place to spend his retirement and write his memoirs. They should have given him a cyanide capsule or a revolver instead.

The next few days passed in a blur. He answers the interrogators questions as best he could, desperately searching his brain for some scrap of information that can put this right. The lawyer assigned to his case was very pleased. With his level of cooperation, a pardon looked very likely indeed. It was all Oleg could do not to throw the man from the room.

Fleischer returned three days later. She looked almost sorry to see him. "God, Petrovsky! When was the last time you trimmed that beard of yours?" She wrinkled her nose. "Or took a bath?"

Oleg shrugged. Where had presentability or military discipline gotten him except complicity in war crimes?

"Well, try to shape up. You have a visitor."

"Visitor?" he repeated hollowly. "Who would want to visit me?" His interrogators had done an admirable job picking his brain for information and collating it for Alliance high command. There was no reason any of them should come in person.

"I would," said a voice.

Oleg stiffened. It couldn't be. Why would she be here? But the clipped, aristocratic voice of his old student was unmistakable. He looked up. Miranda stood in the doorway. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, and she was a bit thinner. She looked older, too, but she always looked older. Decades had passed and she had long since outstripped him in the Cerberus hierarchy, but the image that first came to his mind when he thought of Miranda Lawson would always be the courageous, brilliant girl who had broken into his hotel room in Sydney and swore she would do anything as long as he took her from the hell that was life with Henry Lawson.

"Oleg," she murmured, a slight smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

Oleg stared at her. Miranda was alive and whole before him and happy by the looks of it. The gray suit she wore was immaculate and devoid of insignia. He had been furious when the Illusive Man told him of her resignation. She had turned her back on the cause he had taught her so painstakingly to serve and all for some impulsive young man. Only she had served humanity better that he had, and the young man had been the only thing standing between him and a vengeful Aria.

His face burned as he looked down at his mussed uniform. "You shouldn't see me like this."

"Why not?" Her voice cracked almost imperceptibly. "You've seen me beaten and bloody. I'm just so glad you're alive. So very glad."

She crossed the room to him and took his hands in hers. Oleg looked down at them. Smooth and pale, dwarfed by his large and calloused ones. He swallowed. "I'm… I'm glad you're alive too, Miranda."

She smiled at him, a large crooked smile. "It was rather touch and go for a while there."

"Yes, I heard about Sanctuary." He stepped away from her. "Wanton, senseless loss of human life. All done on the Illusive Man's orders. And I helped him. I'm surprised you can stand to be in the same room with me. I taught you to obey a man who followed the very opposite of the ideals I taught you. I didn't serve humanity. I betrayed it."

"No!" she said with such force that Oleg took an involuntary step backwards. "The Illusive Man lied to us and manipulated us. He's the traitor. We were trying to do good."

He shook his head. "Good intentions count for precious little. Even T'Loak knew what was going on. She tried to tell me that the Illusive Man had had the team on Avernus massacred and then the adjutants had been deliberately set loose on the station. I didn't believe he was capable of such. A colossal tactical blunder."

"Do you remember what you told me after my first command?" Her voice was soft. He didn't know what he had done to deserve such rare gentleness from her, and he wasn't sure what to make of it. "When my squad was wiped out to a man and we still didn't get the schematics we were after? I was prepared to make a suicide charge on the base, but you stopped me."

"Because you atone by fixing your mistakes, not by committing suicide." He smiled at the memory despite himself. "And you studied your errors and took the base in the next attack. But this is quite a bit more grave than a disastrous battle."

"So, do something a bit more important." She took a deep breath. "'A dark time is coming. Humanity will be tested and while we may not know who is doing the testing, or why - we must meet the challenge as we have met all others. We will succeed. Because to do anything else would be inhuman.' Do you still believe that?"

"Quoting the manifesto at me?" He closed his eyes. The hell was that he did believe it. The Illusive Man had apparently used it for his own purposes, but there really were those in the galaxy that meant humanity harm. Turian total war had laid waste to entire settlements on Shanxi. Colonies in the Traverse had been made virtual ghost towns after batarian slavers had come. And now the Reapers were bent on nothing less than the extinction of the human race. Someone had to stand against that. "You know I do."

Fire entered her eyes. Ah, here at last was the Hellhound he had trained to use her tremendous intelligence and skill for humanity. "I thought so. If the Illusive Man will not defend humanity, then I will. I'll bring light to those places the Reapers would see covered in darkness. And I need you to help me."

"Me?"

She chuckled. "It took some doing, but I convinced the Alliance that simply interrogating you was a waste. We're about to embark on the most important military operation humanity has ever seen. Which means we need the best military mind humanity has. We need you."

"The Alliance wants me to assist in planning the battle for Earth? They must be truly desperate to trust me." Miranda nodded. Oleg stroked his beard. This… this he could do. He had spent too long fighting in inconsequential theaters. It was time to join the battle. "What's our troop strength?"

She grinned. "You never could resist a challenge."

"Neither could you."

"We're severely outnumbered. Six to one and that's the generous estimate."

Oleg laughed for the first time since his defeat on Omega. "Wellington was outnumbered through most of the Peninsular campaign. It worked out rather well for him. Simply show me what I have to do."

She switched on her omni-tool and a map of the Sol system appeared. Red dots representing Reaper forces covered the map like blood. Yes, an extraordinary force. And an extraordinary chance to put millennia of tactical genius to the task against the greatest enemy humanity had ever known. Perhaps this wouldn't make up for his mistake in trusting the Illusive Man. Perhaps it was impossible to atone. But he would do his duty.

"This is how you should begin…"


End file.
